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Forum:Elefen in SwiftKey
Hello! I've seen your ticket from December asking for Elefen in SwiftKey. It took me a while to answer, but here I am. I'm the tech lead in charge of languages at SwiftKey. Would you be able to help me locate resources? Are there texts publicly available? I've seen there is a dictionary, but it doesn't necessarily seem to cover inflexions (I don't even know about the grammar of the language). Is that available elsewhere? Let me know, Julien * Hi, Julien, and thanks for answering! Simon * I assume you're asking about texts because you need some fluent input as a starting point for SwiftKey's next-word prediction system. We have quite a lot of well-written texts available, including a Wikipedia in incubation, almost all of which has been proof-read very recently. This wikia site contains a lot of translated stories, although some of them are in earlier versions of the language from before the grammar was finalised. Five lengthy stories whose language is up to date include Alice in Wonderland (also here), Through the Looking Glass, The Fall of the House of Usher, A Christmas Carol and Letters from the Earth. Two decent scientific texts are this and this. Simon ** I think Aora Oji is a good source as well.. Isaac *** Yes, good suggestion – it's a daily news blog that ran throughout 2014, 2015 and 2016 and has recently started up again. The only minor caveat for seeding the text prediction is that entries in October 2016 and earlier use "se" as the third-person possessive rather than the form "sua" that we ultimately settled on. "Se" is now never possessive; it's only ever the reflexive pronoun (which it also served as historically). (Bizarre coincidence: I've just noticed that today's article is number 2018 on the blog!) Simon * The master copy of the dictionary is held here, in an idiosyncratic but machine-readable format. However, you'll probably find it easier to use the JSON copy which is generated automatically from the master, and which serves as the database for our dictionary search engine. The JSON is just a flat array of objects, each of which represents either a root (T:"r"), a derivation of the closest preceding root (no T field), or an additional sense of the immediately preceding item (T:"s"). Roots and derivations account for almost the entire dictionary; the only words that are treated as multiple senses are prepositions. Derivations include words formed by adding prefixes and suffixes to roots, and also phrases of two or more words. The Elefen spelling of each root and derivation is in the L field, the English translations are in the en field, and the parts of speech are the first element(s) of the array in the C field. (The other elements are semantic categories.) For a complete list of the parts of speech, view the HTML of the search engine page (actually mostly JavaScript) and look at function InisiaCategorias – the parts of speech are the grammatical:true categories. Simon * The grammar is available in English here. There's only one inflection: the plural -s (-es after a consonant). There are a number of common prefixes and suffixes and all forms are regular. The dictionary search engine contains a spell checker that is able to deduce certain basic forms, so you may want to look at the code for that – it starts with function TrovaMalspeles, and the seven functions that immediately follow contain rules for recognising plural nouns, adjectives negated with the prefix "non-", and adjectives derived from verbs (i.e. participles in "-nte" and "-da", plus the suffix "-able"). The identifiers and comments in the dictionary's code are (of course!) written in Elefen, not English, but as Elefen is one of the easiest possible languages for someone who knows English or any Romance language, I'm certain you'll have no difficulty :-) I'll be very happy to help with any questions, technical details, etc. As you've probably deduced from the above, I'm a developer by trade myself. Simon * Hi Simon, Julien got back to me. He prefers having only one contact to deal with, communicating by email. If you have the time, can you be that contact? If you agree, you can give me your address by emailing me at isaac.benharush at gmail.com, and I'll relay it to him. Thanks, Isaac. * SwiftKey has added support for Lingua Franca Nova! Update the app and then download the language pack from the settings. I have it on my android phone. I'm not sure if the iOS version was updated as well. iPhone users, please let us know. Isaac * Eselente! Simon